The moment that thought occurred to her, Beth realized that she had come to a decision without really meaning to. Apparently, she had decided to hold on to the scribe’s letter after all. She was shocked in a way. It was wrong; it was unethical. And it could lead to professional disaster. How could she ever even publish her findings without disclosing her source material and revealing how she had come by it?
But if she told al-Kalli about the letter and returned it to him, there was a very good chance it would never again see the light of day. She would never be able to have an analysis done of the paper and ink; she would never be able to display it to the world, and she would never be able to prove that its eyewitness account of the First Crusade, or the scribe’s imprisonment and death, were anything more than some frustrated scholar’s concoction. It was bad enough that The Beasts of Eden might wind up locked away from sight for another thousand years, but the idea that this rare and powerful and terrifyingly authentic letter should also vanish into oblivion was simply too much. Maybe Hildegard was right — the wrong people possessed these treasures.
As she approached her office, she saw Jakob, holding the heavy box in which she had first seen the bestiary, waiting by the door, and she could hear Mrs. Cabot inside saying, “I’m sure she’s on the premises. The garage attendant said her car is still here.”
From the nervousness in Cabot’s voice, Beth could tell things were going badly. She put on her brightest, most reassuring smile and swept past Jakob into the room.
“Mr. al-Kalli,” she said, extending her hand — he was standing at the corner of her desk, as if he’d been surreptitiously looking over the papers spread out there—“it’s a pleasure to see you.”
Mrs. Cabot looked as if she could faint from relief.
“My assistant, Elvis Wright, tells me you’d like to see the results of the work we’ve been doing.” In her heart of hearts, she was still hoping to persuade him to leave things as they were, and to let the book itself remain in the conservation wing.
He took her hand, but coldly. He was dressed immaculately, as always, in a midnight blue suit and a yellow silk tie fixed by a gold pin at the collar.
“The computer software is yielding a more thorough and accurate English version than we could ever have expected.” Keep emphasizing the progress being made. “And faster than a whole battery of scholars could do it.”
“Not fast enough, I’m afraid. I want everything you have done to date.”
“I’ve already told Elvis to prepare that for you. He’s next door compiling it all right now.” Unable to restrain herself, she glanced at Jakob, holding the box — now containing the book itself — right outside the office. “But without the actual bestiary on the premises, it will be harder to continue the work in the way we would like. By completing the graphemical catalogue, and its accompanying translation, we had hoped to make the wonders of this work readily accessible, online, to scholars everywhere.”
“Really?” said al-Kalli dryly. “That was never my hope.”
Even after dealing with al-Kalli for some time now and suspecting the worst, Beth was still taken aback by his tone. “It wasn’t?”
“What I wanted — what I needed — was to know what every word in the book said. If that’s been done, and if the book itself has been suitably restored, the work is done.”
“But you have no intention, ever, of sharing The Beasts of Eden with the world?”
Al-Kalli glanced at the door as Elvis entered, carrying a stack of multicolored cardboard folders, each one devoted to a separate quire in the book and the work that had been done on it. Elvis plopped them on the desk in front of al-Kalli.
“No,” he said to Beth as he leafed through the folders, reading the tabs that indicated what each contained. Satisfied, he looked up at Jakob, who came in, placed the folders on top of the iron box, and then walked out again.
Al-Kalli reached into the breast pocket of his jacket and withdrew a slim, ivory-colored envelope. “But I don’t want you to think I am ungrateful,” he said, handing it to Beth. Then he turned on his well-polished heel, nodded to a speechless Mrs. Cabot, and left. There was a faint scent of Bay Rum in the air.
Beth stood stock-still, as did Mrs. Cabot, until Elvis shrugged and said, “It’s not like we don’t have our own copies of everything.”
That was true. But without the actual book, Beth thought, what good did it all do? It was like a wonderful review of a movie no one could see, an authoritative article on a painting never to be exhibited, an exegesis of a text no one could ever read. Worse, without a public source, or an authentic artifact, to point to, it was like an exercise in the fantastic. None of it could, or would, ever be taken seriously.
She turned the envelope over in her hand. It was closed, to her surprise, with red sealing wax, on which the initials MAK had been impressed; she hadn’t seen anything like it outside the movies, where people like Sir Thomas More got missives from the Archbishop of Canterbury. She broke the seal and removed two cashier’s checks — the first, in the amount of one million dollars, was made out to the Getty Conservation Institute. She passed it wordlessly to Mrs. Cabot. The second check, she had no idea what to do with. It was made out to her personally, in the amount of one hundred thousand dollars. Elvis craned his neck to get a good look at it, then whistled.
“Whoa,” he said, “looks to me like that includes a hefty bonus for your executive assistant.”
Beth wanted to say that she couldn’t accept this, but al-Kalli was already gone. Mrs. Cabot came closer, and Beth held it out for her to see. “Should I just tear it up?” Beth said.
“It’s a cashier’s check,” Mrs. Cabot said, “it’d be like tearing up the actual money.”
“What should I do with it?”
Mrs. Cabot looked puzzled, too. She was running all the ethical standards through her mind, but it wasn’t clear exactly which one was being violated. Al-Kalli wasn’t asking Beth to lie about anything; he wasn’t enlisting her official support in a dubious claim. He wasn’t asking her to back up a suspicious provenance or declare something to be the work of an Old Master that had been previously attributed to a lowly apprentice. In fact, he was removing the object in question from all such considerations. So it clearly wasn’t a bribe — it was a gift. But the Getty did have in place a clear and strictly enforced policy that required all museum employees to report anything at all that might represent, in any way, a conflict of interest. And on those grounds alone, the check had to be declared, cleared, and only then, possibly released.
“I say cash it, quick,” Elvis whispered in Beth’s direction, then scooted out before Mrs. Cabot could admonish him.
“I’ll have to take this to the CFO’s office,” Mrs. Cabot said of the million-dollar check. “And I might as well take that one, too, for safekeeping,” she continued, snatching it out of Beth’s hand. “The museum counsel will have to decide whether or not you can accept it.”
Mrs. Cabot left, too, now, and Beth suddenly found herself bereft in her own office — alone, in the late afternoon, without The Beasts of Eden, and without the king’s ransom she had just been holding in her hand. She didn’t hold out much hope of ever seeing it again — Mrs. Cabot would find a way either to have it returned or, if al-Kalli consented, deposited instead in the museum’s coffers. Nobody ever became a museum curator for the money… but still, it had been nice to feel rich, even if it was only for a minute or two.